"Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears. He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends"

So begins a New York Times profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which Assange himself calls a "character assassination." Read about Assange's response in the Huffington Posthere.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

After Runi Limary was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, she sent a blood sample to Myriad Genetics for testing. "The lab report revealed Limary had an unusual variation in the BRCA 1 gene, but Myriad couldn't determine whether it was a dangerous mutation or a benign, uncommon one." Limary tried to get a second opinion, but couldn't: Myriad holds a monopoly on testing because it own patents on the BRCA genes. More here.

Proponents of evidence-based medicine, comparative effectiveness research and insurer incentives argue these tools can promote health and cut costs by ensuring that doctors are using "best practices" when treating patients. The common element in these strategies is reducing doctor discretion in treating individual patients in favor of the treatments that appear to have worked best for populations. The New York Times reports on UnitedHealthcare's plan to offer doctors an additional fee "to encourage doctors to follow standard treatments rather than opting too often for individualized and unproven courses of therapy, which can include the most expensive drug combinations." Read about it here.

If your spayed dog or cat is in heat, stop letting it lick that hormone cream off of you. The New York Times' Tara Parker-Pope reports on how some of the 440,00 prescriptions for topical estrogen products for post-menopausal women end up in their pets and children.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

In Daniel Carlat's article, "Dr. Drug Rep," which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in November of 2007, Carlat describes his experience of being a "detail man" for the Wyeth antidepressant Effexor. Years ago when investigating patient responses to commonly used antidepressants, I found an online petition to take Effexor off the market, authored and signed by enraged former and current Effexor users. Many of the patient comments echo Carlat's nagging concerns that he was hesitant to mention during his industry-funded "physician education" lunch talks, especially those regarding withdrawal effects. See the petition and patient comments, here.

For a brief period in the late 1990s, George Dohrmann was the most hated man in Minnesota. As a sports reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, he broke the story of how Jan Gangelhoff, a university tutor, had written papers and taken exams for at least 20 players on the University of Minnesota men's basketball team. Governor Jesse Ventura denounced him; hate mail poured in; Dohrmann won a Pulitzer Prize and soon left the state to take a job with Sports Illustrated.

His new book is Play Their Hearts Out, an eight-year investigation into the ugly, cut-throat world of "grassroots" basketball, where kids as young as eight years old are manipulated and exploited by shoe-company executives, sports reporters, college recruiters and wannabe coaches on the make. Dohrmann will read from his book tonight at 7 pm at the Edina Barnes and Noble at 3225 W. 69th Street. More information about the book can be found here.

Monday, October 18, 2010

"Anas Aremeyaw Anas is a Ghanaian investigative journalist with many disguises—from addict to imam—and one overriding mission: to force Ghana’s government to act against the lawbreakers he exposes." Read a profile of this remarkable journalist in The Atlantic.

"The Wall Street Journal caught Nielsen “scraping” personal data from PatientsLikeMe.com, a site where people with medical problems go to discuss their meds and symptoms. But don’t kid yourself that PatientsLikeMe is the victim here: Its entire business model is about selling private patient information to the highest bidder." Read here

"One of the many fascinating pieces of information contained in this recent report from Youth Today, a newspaper for workers in the youth corrections field, is this: In 2008, the Texas Youth Commission was spending an average of $60,000 a month on the powerful anti-psychotic drug Seroquel.

"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science." Read the article in The Alantic.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

The feds are investigating a number of drug companies again, this time for their work overseas. According to the WSJ, this time it is for "bribing government-employed doctors to purchase drugs; paying company sales agents commissions that are passed along to government doctors; paying hospital committees to approve drug purchases; and paying regulators to win drug approvals." Read more here.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

As Tara Bannow reports in the Minnesota Daily, the U and the Mayo Clinic are seeking up to $350 million in public and private funding to extend their partnership aimed at finding a cure for diabetes within the next decade.

The Star Tribune reports that starting early next year, the state's largest public hospital will no longer give non-emergency care to out-of-county residents who are uninsured. HCMC estimates the move could save $600,000 a year.

The article also mentions that Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson is arguing that illegal immigrants shouldn't get help from HCMC if the hospital is going to deny care to taxpayers from other counties. But a majority of commissioners disagree.

"The County Board rejected amendments offered by Johnson that would have restricted care to U.S. citizens or immigrants with a green card, and that would have tracked how many of them got treatment. Most commissioners judged those policies either unworkable or unfair."

Monday, October 4, 2010

Or was it just his plumbers? In the new book, Poisoning the Press, Mark Feldstein tells the story of how Charles Colson and G. Gordon Liddy hatched a plan to kill the reporter Jack Anderson. David Corn explains it all here.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

"I didn't make myself clear to the last man I worked for until after I took the job. It was as if the Marquis de Sade had suddenly found himself working for Billy Graham. The man despised me, of course, and I had nothing but contempt for him and everything he stood for. If you asked him, he'd tell you that I'm "not very likable, (that I) hate people, (that I) just want to be left alone, and (that I) feel too superior to mingle with the average person." (That's a direct quote from a memo he sent to the publisher.)"

Today's New York Times has a lengthy article on the explosion of prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs, Pharma's marketing strategies and the resulting patient lawsuits. It's all here: disease-mongering, ghost-writing, payments to prominent doctors... Where have I heard this before?

Picking through musty files in a Pennsylvania archive, a Wellesley College professor made a heart-stopping discovery: US government scientists in the 1940s deliberately infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea in experiments conducted without the subjects’ permission...

From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.

Friday, October 1, 2010

For me, Carl's latest story in The New Yorker brought to mind Agatha Christie mysteries and a touch of Miss Marple. (Nothing like a cozy murder, eh, dearies?) But for another reader, it evoked one of Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States apologized on Friday for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which U.S. government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis. The story is here.

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Who we are

Fear and Loathing in Bioethics began life as blog for "Investigative Journalism and Bioethics," a class taught by Amy Snow Landa and Carl Elliott at the University of Minnesota. Although the class has ended, the blog has not. Most posts now are by Carl Elliott, a professor in the Center for Bioethics. However, they do not in any way represent the views or positions of the University of Minnesota.